Here We Come With Our Hair

I have come to the conclusion (really knew this since I was about eighteen, which is almost sixty-one years ago) that girls, ladies and senior women think of themselves as defined by how their hair looks at this very moment. I started getting my hair done when I was eighteen and working and I could afford about what it cost then as about maybe five dollars. That included getting it washed in the hair salon, and then called the beauty parlor. I went every Saturday after I finished my half day work hours and got there about four PM. The hairdresser (now called hair stylist) was Virginia and she and I became lifelong friends. We kept in touch with birthday cards to each other and anniversary cards too for our wedding dates. Even when she stopped working to have her daughter, I would sometimes go to her house and take my daughter and she would ‘fix’ my hair up which meant smoothing it over a bit. The girls would play together and they were so cute and sweet doing so. Through the years I saw her when I invited her to my son’s Bar Mitzvah and the following party dinner. She came with her daughter who was about four year years older than my son at that time. Then on my twenty wedding anniversary, she came to visit me and had created for me a handmade ceramic vase. She had a kiln in her basement and she was very adept at designing lovely pieces. I still have it and she is gone now almost two years. We visited a lot through the mail, she was not a computer person and the last eight years or so, she would send birthday cards and cash for a gift to my two younger grandchildren. She seemed to get such a kick out of the photos I sent her as they were growing up. She told me once on the phone she had made a lovely collage of the pictures I had sent her, which was about six times a year. The last set I sent her was a few months before her death. I did not know she was sick, she never told me and she seemed to pass away quickly. I was stunned when her daughter called me right after I saw the death notice in the papers. A long and sweet era passed on too. She and I had been friends for over fifty years. The memories will last another fifty years. The vase stands in a place of honor in my family room. So I got to the salon about four in the afternoon on those Saturdays.I had come there by cab from downtown and the boss paid my cab fare from there to about eight or so miles to my home. The fare was about $5.25 from downtown near our harbor now (which was not there then) and I told the cab driver to take me to the salon which was about four blocks from my home. I had no car then. Then after I was finished, I walked the four blocks to our home. Then after she left that salon, I went to one up the street called Jerome’s and that is when I was going with my boyfriend Jerome. So see, names do make a difference. When I got married in 1960, she did not come to the wedding, but she sent me a crystal water pitcher trimmed in sterling silver designs. I still have it sitting as a showpiece on a high shelf in the kitchen. When she passed on almost 4 years ago, I wrote an eulogy but I was overcome by sadness, I could not talk to deliver it. Her daughter Amy read it for me.It was about our constant friendship which in the last twenty years was mainly through phone calls and letters by the post office. I begged her to get a computer so we could ‘talk’ via it; she would have no desire to learn to use one. We still were able through the phone and mail to still love one another. On one of her letters to me, she wrote “that every person in this world should have a friend like Elita.” I felt the same way about her. It shows you can still be devoted friends and not see one another. After her husband passed on a few years ago; I asked her out to dinner several times and that we would pick her up and take her home. She declined saying she did not go out much any more. After her not doing my hair anymore, I had several different ones do it at different times. I almost do not remember their names. Some I do and some I do not care to even give a thought. I had a dear one named Dee and she did my hair for about fifteen years and my mom’s too. My mom use to say that “Dee had golden hands.” She left to pursue the making of custom made fancy and expensive ballroom dance gowns and she has been quite successful. When Mom died, she came to the house of mourning to see us. Dee was a kind and caring hair stylist and I told her once that her name stood for Dee-lightful. I have seen her through the years at ballroom dance competitions where we both frequent. Once I saw her and her husband clapping for me when I did an exhibition dance and I saw it on the video I had taken. When the kids were small, I had a barber do my son’s hair and the shop was located in the Hess Shoe Store on Belvedere Avenue. The theory behind it being there was I believe that maybe you would buy the kid new shoes and get his or her haircut at the same time. It is like getting your prescription filled at the food store while you are shopping there. The barber was a nice young fellow and all the kids liked him. When we were in Denmark, my son wanted to bring him home a gift. So we found a man’s comb in a case and we bought it for him. His name I believe was Mr. Ray. Once years ago, my husband and I were in a restaurant and we saw him and we all recognized each other and he asked about my son and we told him of course, he was all grown up by then and had a son himself. He remembered the gift from Denmark. I had a hairstylist who did my hair for many years and she also did it for the weekend I danced in a competition out near the BWI airport area mentioned above with Dee. She won the ten million lottery here which in about 1991 or so was considered a big one. Now days the lotteries are worth 100 million or more. Needless to say, she left working at the salon a few months later after winning it. A year or so later,my daughter and I were shopping in Target, and we marveled, there she was, the millionaire and she was standing in line like us, buying toothpaste and essentials, just like us who were non-millionaires. You think of rich people not doing regular and everyday tasks. Of course, they still need these fundamental and necessary things. When I went to Jerome’s hair salon, I got a section of my front brunette hair made blonde. It cost the high sum of five dollars plus tip to do it and I was quite ahead of my own time. Now ninety percent of all women, young and old have these streaks called highlights and low lights done all the time. Then in about 1957, it really showed up in the wearer quite prominently. My husband (then boyfriend) even made a comment while courting me. He said “ I cannot take you home to meet my mother with it like that.” I did not change it, which was for sure. I was doing my own thing way before many others were doing the ordinary thing. Virginia use to race cars before she married which was doing her own thing. Dee use to ballroom dance many nights a week doing her own thing. The lottery winner did her own thing in great style with the over three hundred thousand she got clear after taxes by buying a gorgeous and tremendous size house. In those days, you did not take the grand sum, for taxes sake, you split it up for 20 years in receiving it. So perhaps hair makes you do things differently than others did in those days. Blonde hair thick front piece alongside of dark brunette hair, making ballroom dance dresses for others, big houses, and getting a haircut in a shoe store, friends for over fifty years and collages of my grandchildren are all interesting incidents having to do with hair cutting and hair do’s. I even started my ballroom dancing activities because Dee was a ballroom dancer and since I had always wanted to become one, I and we started dance lessons in 1977 when I was going to her for my hairdo. Who was it in the Bible, who had his hair shorn and he lost his strength? Samson. For we who go and get our hair done weekly or semiweekly, we feel strong as Samson because we know we look real pretty and for others of us who are able to do it themselves at home, hair means lots of happy times for us and we caress our hair with love, because it is a huge part of who we are and think we are. This week I did not get my hair done at the salon (formerly called beauty shop) and I think I am still a pretty senior lady who is looking a bit different on the outside, but I have discovered, it is still me, right there inside and even outside. It is still me and that is fine, of course next Friday, I will become the ‘other’ me and the two of ‘me’ are still the same me. I am the same person with a slightly different look. This is OK for the next five days and then I, the real me returns. Blonde hair with darker streaks (reversed from the 1957 era), so many years older and now a senior for sure, a wife, a mother, a Grammie, a writer and when I think about my hair, I ponder and reflect and I am glad it is all still there and how hair does make a difference in our lives. I see on television several talk show ladies who wear different wigs on each show every day and they talk about it freely. I wonder how much they have missed not having the hair stylist acquaintances I have known and my Virginia who I truly loved as my friend. Neither of us had a sister, she was an only child and I had a brother, so we were really sisters and that is truly nice to remember. She always signed her greeting cards to me “Love and hugs.” This is what it was and it still is, much love and surely many hugs. It all came about because of hair. Samson may have lost his strength because of his hair loss; I gained a dear sister from my hair. elita sohmer clayman